Just thinking idly on it - the idea of time travel in HP (MoR or canon) is that you can't change anything, or at least nothing that would lead to you noticing anything different on your eventual return to the present.

We know that memory-alteration magic is a thing.

So theoretically, a Time-Turner (or equivalent) could cast a spell which uses a recording of the status of the world (which possibly explains the 6-hour time limit), lets a mental copy - something like a Horcrux - simulate walking through it, and if the copy tries to do anything which would result in a noticeably different 'present', it gets rewound and minimally tweaked to not make that choice again. The copy ends up rewinding and rechoosing anywhere from zero to potentially millions of times before it finds a spell-accepted way through back to the present. The spell then makes all the 'updates' in the world - updating the caster's brain-state, teleporting them to where the copy thinks they should be, making any other changes in the world (including to other people's brain-states and memories).

Basically, the solution is self-referential; there is no change made to the world until the 'time-traveler' comes back to the point they left from. If there is some change that the spell can't make (for example, affecting something incredibly heavily shielded against alteration), the mental copy is rewound and blocked from making the choice which led to that being a requirement.

But what if there's some setup whereby whatever the faux-traveler does or doesn't do, this results in some change that the spell can't implement? Well, in those incredibly limited circumstances, the time-travel spell simply fails, or at least appears to. Either there's some kind of backlash, or it just doesn't kick in, from the traveler's perspective. Thus you get the ability to time-lock places like Azkaban, or cast time-lock wards.

So: all the effects (mostly) of 'fixed' time travel, none of the actual chronal warping or dangers of real time loops. The whole thing is just a bit of postcognition, with some mental cloning, guided experiences, mental recombining, and probably some teleportation, matter-shifting, and general magical energy expenditure to produce the expected 'updated' results.

I would bet that some of the restrictions on time travel include things like going back in time and casting some kind of magic that takes hours to build towards a final effect, if the time-travel spell can't adjust the magical field/aura/atmosphere of the real world to make it look like that happened.

Hypothesis: there was a wizard in the past who bet their life that, given a year and unlimited funding, they could create a time-travel spell for their shadowy and incredibly wealthy backers. Having spent the year jiggling around with massively overpowered Worldline-Trackers, Chrono-Nullifiers, and Causality-Bypass-O-Matic rituals, they realized with nine hours to go that they weren't going to make it, and instead decided to (1) cheat, and (2) create the most incredibly obscure and unbreakable tesseract-looping self-modifying spaghetti-rune array in the history of wizardry to cover up what they were actually doing.

Every attempt since to replicate the effect has failed, often explosively and fatally, because the researchers are starting from wrong assumptions, thus making Time Turners the only methods of 'time travel' available to modern wizards, who have no idea how to make more, or even how to adjust the parameters beyond 'fixed time loops' and 'six hours total'. Both of these are deliberate limitations to conserve magical power and information storage requirements, and were probably set arbitrarily based on what the inventor had to hand at the time, and how long it took them to rig up a world-recording spell and pull in a couple of hours of 'time travel capability' while they worked on the reality-update side of things.

(With thanks to John C. McCrae and Douglas Adams)

When Amelia talks to Albus after the Bellatrix breakout, she asks him if he wants to hear a message from 4h in the future. In Minerva's POV, we learn that Albus could go back 6h if he didn't receieve the message and so he was considering whether he might want to go more than 2h back. But just talking to Amelia gave him information. For instance, he could have gone back 6h and told someone that in 10h, Ameloa would use her time turner; thus Amelia would have sent the information that she was using the time turner 10h back.

It seems like a cognitive restriction rather than one that originates from fundamental rules of magic.

Season 2 Viktor is basically H.J.P.E.V. at the end of his journey lol

u/Forester-Moon asked me to let this subreddit know once the revised version of my rational fan fiction story, Tom Riddle and the Quest for Dominance, has been published, and now it is. For new readers, this story has been inspired by HPMOR, but diverges from the canon books.

As I understand it HJPEV posits the existence of a gene that determines magic. A wizard has a genotype of MM, a squib Mm, and a muggle mm. In this fic, squibs aren't nonmagic children of magic parents like in book canon. Wouldn't this mean, though, that there wouldn't be any *true* halfbloods, since a wizard and a muggle could only produce squibs (MM + mm -> Mm)? I don't know if there is any reference to a halfblood in the books, but under this theory as I understand it, they would probably be as rare as muggleborns if they could only come from a wizard and a squib who thinks they are a muggle. IDK if its inconsistent with HPMOR canon but it seems weird at the very least. Am I missing something?

Chapter 109:

Even the greatest artifact can be defeated by a counter-artifact that is lesser, but specialized.

That was what the Defense Professor had told Harry, after dropping the True Cloak of Invisibility to pool in fuliginous folds near Harry's shoes.

The Mirror of Perfect Reflection has power over what is reflected within it, and that power is said to be unchallengeable. But since the True Cloak of Invisibility produces a perfect absence of image, it should evade this principle rather than challenging it.

What are some other examples you can think of with lesser but specialized magic overcoming greater magic? What comes to mind for me is Moody's Eye of Vance seeing through the Cloak and the Marauder's Map detecting people under it. What do you think these things have "specialized" in to get through the Cloak's perfect absence of image?

“- Theodore Nott. Vincent Crabbe. Gregory Goyle. Draco Malfoy. This concludes the list.”

One student sitting at the Gryffindor table let out a single cheer, and was immediately slapped by the Gryffindor witch sitting nearby hard enough that a Muggle would have lost teeth.

“Thirty points from Gryffindor and detention for the first month of next year,” Professor McGonagall said, her voice hard enough to break stone.

I'm confused by these paragraphs. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely agree with the sentiment of this paragraph:

The children’s children’s children wouldn’t want Voldemort to die, even if his minions had. They wouldn’t want Voldemort to hurt, if it didn’t accomplish anything compared to him not hurting.

In a sufficiently advanced civilization, inflicting suffering for the sole purpose of inflicting suffering would be considered morally abhorrent.

But everyone at Hogwarts suddenly agreeing that cheering at dead Deatheaters is so bad seems out of character. I think much more people would be cheering, and I wouldn't even consider it bad.

Maybe this is what Harry would have imagined happening, because he felt incredibly guilty at the moment (even that I can totally understand), but I don't see it happening in reality.

Can someone help me understand why was it so bad to cheer at dead evil people? I know that the children of the Deatheaters are there, and I understand why it is disrespectful to them. But if we care about their feelings, we should also care about the feelings of students whose parents were potentially killed by those Deatheaters, and isn't it also disrespectful to forbid them to celebrate?

If you don't like the word "evil", you can substitute it with "producing vast amounts of negative utility, knowingly or not".

“Ripping the stars apart” is the subject of We’ve Been Searching For Aliens All Wrong, Researchers Say Sabine Hossenfelder’s Nov 27, 2024, 7 minute long

In the first day of Transfiguration, Professor McGonagall transfigured a desk into a pig so it is possible to transfigure an inanimate object into a living creature. Could you then continually transfigure your armor into a living blob of flesh that you wear so that if someone tries to avada kedavra you, the flesh armor takes the hit instead of you? And then you would undo the transfiguration and reapply it to reuse your armor.

Actually, could you just make any life form using transfiguration? I guess humans are very complex but if you can turn a desk into a pig, humans shouldn't be that much harder to make. Assuming you had the magic to sustain it, could you create your own personal guard of transfigured humans to fight for you and could they in turn also use magic?

THIS VESSEL IS THE OPTIMISM OF THE CENTER OF THE VESSEL PERSON

YOU HAVE NOT KICKED US

THEREFORE YOU EAT BABIES

WHAT IS OURS IS YOURS, WHAT IS YOURS IS OURS

So everything other than the first sentence is pretty easy to understand. "You have not opened fire on us, which means you are morally good. We want to share information with you." But I can't quite make out what the first sentence is (was stumped on this while explaining to a few reading club members when we held a "assorted bizarre alien " session).

Does it mean something alone the lines of "We come with the best of intentions?" Something lost in translation due to alien lexicon weirdness in general?

Ditto for the first sentence of the second transmission:

WE ARE GLAD TO SEE YOU CANNOT BE DONE

YOU SPEAK LIKE BABY CRUNCH CRUNCH

WITH BIG ANGELIC POWERS

WE WISH TO SUBSCRIBE TO YOUR NEWSLETTER

"Your words ring of moral goodness, and your technology is better than ours. We really want to know everything about you." What does "We are glad to see you cannot be done" mean? Does it mean "Since you're so technologically advanced, we're delightfully surprised to see that there are problems that even you cannot solve easily?"

Crude's Nice Value—a measure of how much more she could bear before breaking—had been creeping dangerously high since the morning's optimization check-in. She needed to get it under control. It was bad enough watching the Executive crowd breeze by on their Fast-RAM Express, their negative-priority passes gleaming like platinum heirlooms. The memory still gnawed at her: those Premium Block offices towering above like crystal hives, where executives held morning standups in climate-controlled comfort, while her own team huddled in the shared Resource Pool, their meeting requests eternally shuffled to the bottom of the Priority Booking System.

Just one more bitter thought about those trust-fund necklaces—the Premium Block access cards dangling from executive children’s necks, granting even their failed pet projects instant booking privileges—and her Nice Value might tip over 20. She’d been through Emotional Refactoring before. She could still feel the chill of the corporate-approved mindfulness injections, chemical gratitude doses designed to smooth out resentment and align her thoughts with the Productivity Protocols. She wasn’t going back there.

That’s why she was here. Resolving her problems with a more organic tasting method.

The changeling bar "MERGE INTO" shifted like quicksilver as Crude stepped inside. The floor couldn't decide what it wanted to be—wood, marble, or metal—and the walls tasted memories from a thousand other taverns. Dreams hung heavy in the air, thick enough to choke on.She slid onto a barstool that purred beneath her like a dreaming cat, its surface reshaping itself to fit her bones.

Even here, in this place of chaos and forgetting, Crude carried the hollowed-out grace she’d perfected in her quarterly Reviews of Worthiness. It was the art of survival: thoughts polished smooth before they could catch on truth, emotions filed down to fit neatly into sanctioned patterns. The collar around her neck, a silent enforcer of the system’s rules, rested against her fur like a lover’s cold betrayal.

"Bootstrap, neat," she growled to the bartender, who flickered behind the bar like candlelight through tears. Their shifting features tested forgotten masks, each movement leaving traces of ozone and starlight in the air. The Bootleg Bootstrap here was infamous, a drink brewed from desperation and dreams. Its “random seed(69420)” recipe promised a unique experience every time—or as Crude’s wolf-tongue called it, soul-licking. The drink rummaged through memories like a thief, stealing fragments to wear as costume.

For her, it always began with starlight’s kiss, sharp and clean, before descending into dark chocolate depths that sang of midnight hunts. Cala would called it “too garlicky,” somehow the drink always clawing at his memories of home-cooked protection spells like a child clutching at trinkets. But for Crude, this chaotic blend of past and present was her only refuge, a fleeting escape from the system’s pattern recognition. Here, memories spun too wild and free for algorithms to brand or control.

Usually, the drink shimmered into existence in a glass that felt like holding tomorrow and yesterday at once, its surface tension wavering between wine and liquid starlight. She would lift it to her lips and took a long sip, feeling the chaos settle into her veins like a long-lost friend. In this place, beneath stars that hadn’t been branded into constellations, she could almost taste freedom again.

Almost.

“That's quite an... idiosyncratic choice," The bard's face was a patchwork of borrowed looks—part classic bartender, part therapist, all fake. Their words carried the hollow weight of secondhand wisdom, each gesture a carefully practiced performance. "Most wolves prefer more... systematic refreshments. Have you considered a nice Lasso instead? Helps narrow down the important variables, strips away the noise. Helps remove those personal... peculiarities."

Crude's collar sparked slightly, sensing her irritation as the wolf in her soul rolled its eyes at this peacock-dance of fake refinement. "Not interested in filing down my rough edges," she said flatly. Her inner beast stretched beneath her skin, adding chaos to their precious predictions just by breathing.

"Ah, but that's just it." The bard's face shifted to something they probably practiced in mirrors, features arranging themselves into what some focus group had decided looked wise and caring. "Your kind's love patterns are so wonderfully primitive." Their hands began weaving through air thick with pretension, pulling streams of light into shapes that probably meant something to someone who'd skimmed the right textbooks. "No risk management in matters of the heart, as we say in elevated circles." Geometric patterns swirled between their fingers like jewelry stolen from mathematics itself, each symbol worn like costume bangles to impress the equally fake. "The Lasso helps domesticate those wild impulses. Makes everything more... regularized .

The drink materialized with a sound like counting coins - clear liquid trapped in a perfect diamond lattice, each facet cutting away at reality until only the "essential features" remained, as the changelings loved to say in their borrowed wisdom. It reeked of efficiency, each crystalline edge promising to slice away everything that made a soul unique until only the "optimal parameters" remained - or as Crude's wolf-nose translated: until you were bland enough to sell at market rates. The mere scent made her hackles rise, recognizing an old predator wearing new mathematics as camouflage.

"We changelings," the bard continued, their form flickering through different masks like a trader sampling portfolios, "we understand the true market of hearts." Light rippled across their skin in waves of calculation, each shift testing new combinations for maximum return on emotional investment. "There's no premium for loyalty in our world. Every love can be replicated, every passion synthesized into tradeable units." They gestured at their constantly shifting face, each iteration a new mask borrowed from souls they'd probably left bankrupt of feeling. "But wolves..." Their nose wrinkled with the same distaste stockbrokers showed penny shares. "You treat your quirks like treasures instead of liabilities. Each scar, each memory, each..." They sniffed delicately, like a loan shark sampling desperation. "...unauthorized investment in feelings that'll never yield returns."

Crude's fingers found her collar, the silver burning cold against her skin as she thought of Cala. The mere memory sent ripples through the bar's carefully calculated reality - tiny truth-bombs in their fortress of fake sophistication. "Some bonds aren't meant to be broken down and resold as derivatives."

"Oh darling," the bard's features suddenly borrowed Cala's face with the same soulless precision a counterfeiter copies banknotes, making Crude's heart stutter between beats. "That's exactly what the Lasso is for." Their diamond-glass smile cut like margin calls in a bear market. "Helps identify which emotional assets have tradeable value. Zeros out the worthless ones." They let Cala's features dissolve into static, a sample of their "liquidity management" techniques. "Very popular with the Upper Management crowd—they say it helps optimize those nasty cross species romantic portfolios."

Crude's claws extended slightly, leaving new scratches in the bar's surface like a credit record marred by too much truth. "And I suppose you changelings never have that problem?" Her lip curled, wolf features bleeding through her carefully maintained corporate appearance. "All your loves perfectly hedged, perfectly diversified against the risk of feeling too much?"

"We prefer the term 'efficiently priced emotional derivatives,'" the bard's features settled briefly into something almost sincere, though their skin still rippled with potential arbitrage opportunities. "No room for untradeable sentiments in our portfolios." Their eyes mapped Crude like a quant analyzing an anomalous trading pattern. "But you..." Static crawled across their borrowed features like algorithms searching for profit patterns. "You're all high-risk investments. Unique market reactions. Personal..." They paused, tasting the word like a sommelier sampling wine gone to vinegar, "...correlations that can't be securitized and sold."

Through the bar's reality-warped windows, Crude caught glimpses of autumn painting the world in gloriously chaotic colors. Maple trees bled sunset hues into the sky, each one dying in its own particular way, following its own unique trajectory toward winter. Not packaged into normalized tables for quick consumption. No systematic pattern to their organic transformation. The sight made something wild and defiant stir in her chest.

"Still want that Bootrap?" the bard asked, their voice sampling from a thousand different tones of concern. "It won't help drop out those outlier feelings. Only duplicate them, won’t make your choices any more... orzodox.”

Crude watched the bard's features cycle through another parade of borrowed faces, each one stinking of theft - identities peeled from other souls and worn like cheap masks at a discount carnival. "You changelings," she said finally, letting her wolf's ancient wisdom rumble through her voice like thunder before rain. "Always trying to polish everyone else until they shine just right. As if your perfect little performances could catch the taste of real living."

The bard laughed, their form dissolving momentarily into television snow - static in reality's eyes. "Says the werewolf wearing Upper Management's favorite leash." Their smile danced between false comfort and gleaming superiority, like a snake trying different ways to look friendly before it strikes. "At least we choose our chains." Their skin crawled with borrowed patterns like maggots under silk. "Some of us understand the art of strategic surrender."

Crude touched her collar, feeling its weight like a constant whisper of "not enough, never enough," each molecule carved with someone else's idea of perfect. The metal burned cold against her fur, each atom a tiny "no" to everything wild and true inside her.

"Just give me the fucking Bootstrap," she growled, letting enough wolf shine through her eyes to make the bard's next face-change stutter like a lie caught mid-telling. The air around her crackled with forbidden authenticity, with truths too sharp to be filed smooth.

"Your funeral," the bard shrugged, their features sampling concerned looks like a child trying on their parent's clothes. "Though if you're determined to stay..." Their eyes flicked to the autumn-painted windows, where reality remained gloriously untamed. "Nature's wearing her best chaos these days. All wildness, no cleaning required." The words dripped with forced casualness, like poison honey meant to draw flies.

"Good," Crude said. The drink appeared—dark as wolf dreams, with patterns that moved like moonlight through forest leaves.Each sip tasted of raw memory, unfiltered and true. Crude watched her reflection dance across the Bootstrap's surface like moonlight on water, shifting between wolf and human, revealing versions of herself too wild to be tamed by names or numbers.

"Not all of us get to choose our chains," she said quietly, the silver collar's weight speaking of board meetings and quarterly reviews and all the ways they'd tried to tame the moon out of her blood. "Some cages come built into the bones.”

The bard's face settled into something that might have been real - a rare moment when their borrowed features arranged themselves into what looked almost like truth. "No. But we all choose what to keep," they said, then paused, adding more softly, "And what memories we let burn us bright.”

Through her drink, Crude caught a glittering shard of Cala's smile, a treasure no amount of corporate conditioning could pry from her heart. The memory tasted like midnight chocolate and star-bright defiance - her own wild howl added to their carefully measured recipe. The Bootstrap burned like ancient promises against her tongue, and she let it drag her deep, let it stir up all the untamed truths they couldn't collar…

—

The memory rose like moonlight through water: herself balanced bare-skinned on an old birch's shoulders, autumn wind singing wolf-songs against her fur. Around her, the pack had gathered, their bodies flowing between shapes not from uncertainty but from pure joy. Moira's soft Highland lilt had melted into a growl sweet as heather honey, while Dmitri's thunder-rough voice had found its true depth in the wolf's throat.

They'd stripped away their clothes - not the stiff collars and tight shoes that marked their daylight hours, but their own worn garments that carried the stories of their lives. Chen's jacket still held the ghost-scent of his grandmother's herbs, Rosa's boots had walked seven cities' worth of streets. Their wolf-songs rose wild and free, each voice finding its own way to the moon. No measured beats, no careful rhythms - just the fierce joy of bodies remembering their first shape.

Their fur had rippled out in waves of silver and grey and brown, each pattern as unique as love letters written in starlight. Moira's coat caught fire in the sunset, russet as autumn leaves, while Dmitri's storm-grey ruff rose like thunderclouds. The birch's eye had wept sap like tears of joy as they'd howled their gratitude to the retreating sun. The approaching polar winter had painted the horizon in colors deeper than dreams - purples dark as secret nights, oranges wild as fox-fire.

Her claws -sharp and sure then, before silver and rules had bound them- had carved the watching-eye into moon-pale bark, opening a window so the ancient tree could witness the wolf-clan's farewell to summer's light. She remembered how the bark-dust had tasted of centuries, how magic had run raw and real through her blood like lightning through storm clouds. The tree's sap had wept gold in moonlight, each drop a promise that some things remained too wild wild for walls and schedules.

The memory filled her mouth with the taste of wind-dressed leaves and secrets older than cities, of freedom that ran deeper than any chain could reach. She had been pure wolf then, her only bounds the ones written in starlight and sung in pack-songs passed down through blood and bone. The magic hadn't needed permission or paperwork - it had simply been, as natural as breathing, as true as a howl rising to greet the moon's first light.

—

The memory burned: Meek's eyes on her collar. Same model. Same prime number. The question he didn't quite ask. Her teeth in his shoulder—no blood, twelve anger management sessions had taught her that much control. His wool absorbing a tear that wasn't his.But the Bootrap kept resampling, pulling darker threads from her past…

—

The first signs always came with the dying light. As polar night approached, the lassies would get restless, faces flushed despite the cold. Crude remembered herself at four, the way words would tangle in her throat like thorns - mainland words Doc Ross had taught her, precise as scalpels, now slipping away as the wolf stirred beneath her skin. She'd pace the schoolroom, Doc Ross's voice steady as a heartbeat: "Now then, let's try again. The patient presents with..."

Patient. Present. Pretty words from SUS, that fabled land where buildings stayed the same shape every time you blinked, where light behaved itself and didn't pool in corners like spilled ink. Doc Ross spoke of it like a prayer: steel bridges that never swayed in dream-winds, hospitals with floors you could count on to stay numbered in order. "In SUS," she'd say, her accent crisp as autumn frost, "even gravity keeps regular hours."

The transformations came naturally to most, like breathing or bleeding or loving. One night you'd feel the moon's quivering in your bones, and your body would answer. The hunting spirit would wake, not erasing your mind but sharpening it to a primal edge. Thoughts became clearer, stripped of hesitation. The world resolved into truth: pack and stranger, survival and death.

But Doc Ross - ah, she'd fought her wolf like it was a disease to be cured. Four years in SUS medical schools, drowning her true nature in coffee darker than polar night. "Evidence-based medicine," she'd tell Crude during their lessons, the shadows curling too lovingly around her feet even as she spoke of statistical significance. "That's what separates healing from hoping."

Crude had watched her mentor's face when the mainland hospitals sent their polite rejections. They'd praised her brilliance, her dedication, her perfect command of their language. Then listed positions filled, opportunities elsewhere, always elsewhere. They never mentioned how she moved too quietly down clinic halls, how her eyes caught light like a predator's even under fluorescent glare.

She'd come back to teach, her collar gleaming with borrowed silver and borrowed pride. Still teaching SUS-words to wolf-children, as if names could tame the wild in their blood. When polar night threatened, she'd fortified her home like a diagnosis she could prevent.

"Multiple redundant light sources," she'd explained at the town meeting, her mainland accent growing sharper with each word, though Crude could hear the wolf-whine beneath it. "Mirrors to maximize coverage. I've installed extra windows – the more eyes on a space, the more it maintains coherence."

The elders had exchanged looks heavy with memory. Old Moira had spoken, her Highland burr thick with concern: "Lass, ye can't out-clever the dark. Let the wolf's eyes see true."

"I took an oath," Doc Ross had replied, fingers touching her silver collar like a rosary. "First, do no harm." But Crude, who knew both her languages now, heard what she didn't say: First, do not become the thing they feared. "Besides," she'd added, "my methods are working. The corners only drift a little now, and only when I blink."

—

The drink made her collar feel heavier. She touched it, remembering how Doc Ross had worn hers like armor against the dark. Pride before survival. Just like the mainlanders who never understood...

—

Through the dormitory window, Oracle’s update notifications streaked across the sky like falling stars, burning out before they could grant a single wish. Crude pressed her palm to the glass, her reflection fracturing into shards of moonlight and ghostly text.

“Ten years,” she murmured, the silver collar at her throat gleaming like a shackle. “A decade of Oracle’s promises, and we still can’t share a table at Le Petit Query without tripping every damn alarm.”

Cala’s laugh was sharp, brittle, as if it might shatter the night. “Think tomorrow’s anniversary celebrations will come with a miracle? ‘In honor of ten years of unity, we’re unshackling you all—free drinks and dignity for everyone!’” His fangs flashed, but his eyes stayed shadowed, the laughter hollow.

“You mock it,” Crude turned, her voice quivering, “but they swore this system would bring us together. No more borders, no more permissions. Just… unity.” She traced the edge of her collar, the chill biting her fingertips. “Do you even remember when crossing a district boundary meant disintegration? Now they just triple the fees.”

Cala’s gaze softened, but his words cut like old wounds reopening. “It’s not that simple. You can’t just force things to fit—”

“Force?” Crude’s voice rose, sharp and cracked, her eyes molten with unshed tears. “Is that what we are, Cala? Something forced? Something… incompatible?”

“You know that’s not what I—”

“No?” Her laugh was wild, bitter, as if it might collapse the world around them. “Then explain the fees. The forms. The warnings. Every time I have to beg the system just to touch your hand without the world deciding we’re an error.”

She stepped closer, her words catching on the raw edge of her need. “Do you know what it feels like? To love someone and have to justify it? Every. Single. Time?”

Cala flinched as the proximity alarm hummed between them, its invisible wall thickening the air. Still, his body betrayed him, leaning toward her like a tide drawn to the moon.

“They say it keeps reality stable.” His voice was quieter now, fraying at the edges. “It’s still better than before…”

Crude’s lips twisted in a bitter smile. “Better?” She took another step, the alarms screaming now, her collar glowing faintly in protest. “This isn’t better, Cala. It’s a prettier cage.”

His eyes flicked to hers, and in them, she saw not denial but helplessness. The weight of too many years spent following rules that broke them both.

“Maybe we’re all just errors,” she whispered, the words trembling like glass on the verge of shattering. “But I’d rather let the world break than spend another day pretending this is love.”

Above them, Oracle’s notifications streaked and fizzled, the stars of a world too small for them both.

—

The hunts themselves were poetry written in pawprints and blood . Packs would patrol the coastline, picking off winter-fat seabirds and the occasional seal. Inland groups tracked rabbit signs through snow so deep it swallowed wolf-legs whole. The younger ones would practice on rats and mice, learning to read wind and spoor and starlight.

The howling was constant through the dark months. Not the mindless noise outsiders imagined, but conversations that needed no SQL to query meaning:

*Here! Fresh tracks!*

*Warning - thin ice ahead*

*Young ones stay close*

*Success! Sharing at dawn*

—

"It maintains consistency," Cala insisted, though his voice faltered, his eyes betraying doubt. "Merge werewolf and vampire tables? The processing lag alone would destabilize everything."

"Better lag than loneliness." Crude’s words fell soft as moonlight, sharp as the silver at her throat. "Better inconsistency than never touching."

Cala exhaled, his smile thin and scarred. "You sound like a first-year, trying to solve centuries of segregation with a JOIN statement. Reality’s more complicated than our feelings, Crude."

"Is it?" She stepped closer, her movements sending faint ripples through the air, the local physics bending under her presence. "Or did we make it complicated? Did we slice ourselves into so many tables and schemas that we forgot we're all part of the same query?" Her voice softened, a whisper on the edge of breaking. "The same heart?"

Cala shook his head, his tone edged with static. "And your solution? One universal table? Throw everyone's attributes together and hope love conquers null pointers? That’s not how relational databases—or reality—work."

"No." Her eyes caught the glow of Oracle’s sky-bound notifications, their light reflecting fire and rebellion. "That’s how we choose to make them work. Don’t you see? Fate’s resourceful—it builds its read-only walls, ignores our hearts, our data, our choices. But it’s us. We’re the ones who accepted these tables. We’re the ones who let them sort and index us into little boxes, ranked and priced. And now we call it life.”

Cala’s voice dropped, almost pleading. “Without the system, every breath you take—every step you make—it obfuscate with dreams. The world only real because Oracle keeps it indexed. Your realness, your body, the moonlight on your face—it’s all tied to your attributes. Your wealth. Your rank. Without the Schema Table, you wouldn’t even exist."

"And you think that’s life?" Crude’s laugh cracked like shattering glass. "A system where I only get sunsets if I’ve been polite enough? Where soup tastes better for the rich and gravity pulls harder on the poor? You think that’s better than nothing?”

His hand dropped to her side, trembling. "Maybe I don’t want to survive in a world where I can’t hold you without a permission slip. Where the only love allowed is love that doesn’t touch. Maybe we weren’t meant to fit into their perfect little boxes. If… ”

—

They found the entries in her journal growing increasingly frantic:

"Lamps failing one by one. Not burning out – just forgetting how to shine. Tried replacing them but the new ones catch the forgetting too. Like the dark is infectious."

"Mirrors showing wrong reflections. Had to cover them. Better no observation than false observation."

"The shadows are pooling wrong. They're reaching. They're hungry. Must maintain observation. Must keep watching. Must remember what shapes are supposed to—"

The last entry was a scrawl: "I understand now. The eyes are the problem. They let it in. They let me see what's happening to everything else. Have to stop looking. Have to stop—"

—

Cala’s eyebrows shot up. "Destroy—" He chuckled, but the laugh died when he saw her face. "You're serious."

"Dead serious." She yanked out a piece of paper, sketching furiously, ”Let there be orzo! Each grains is an object, free to.… ”

"Objects?" Cala echoed, incredulous.

"Self-contained units of reality," her words tumbled out like forbidden poetry. "Instead of gravity being a service we beg for, it becomes part of us. Our own rules. Our own behaviors. Our own inheritance—"

"Inheritance? Like a baby with both vampires and werewolf super-type? " Cala crossed his arms, but curiosity flickered in his eyes, “That would be impossible without …”

“Yes, any class can inherent from another class. Love from wherever it chooses to flow. No more constraints, no more integrity checks. Just... us.”

—

The mating happened naturally too, though the human part of your brain stayed aware enough to be mortified later, a distant observer trapped behind eyes gone wild with moonlight. Crude remembered her first season of eligibility – when scents became liquid symphonies that painted the air in swirling crimsons and golds, when her packmates' fur rippled with white saliva and their movements left glowing trails across the night like falling meteors. The awkward dance of courtship transformed their hunts into poetry – blood-bright displays where every leap and kill blurred into a savage ballet, each wolf pretending their precise, deadly grace wasn't meant to catch more than prey.

"Just don't get pregnant your first winter," Mam had warned, her eyes reflecting the knowing of a thousand dark seasons. "The Long Dark hungers for the weak. Focus on learning the hunt patterns, let your bones memorize the paths between shadows. Babies come after you've proven you can steal life from Winter's jaws."

—

She reached for his hand. The room erupted with cascading warnings:

CRITICAL: Unauthorized biomarker proximity detected Cross-species fluid exchange protocols violated Hemodynamic compatibility indices exceeding safety parameters Immediate quarantine recommended

But for the first time, Cala didn't pull away. His fingers interlaced with hers, vampire frost meeting wolf fire in ways that made Oracle's reality engines howl with violation warnings. Their touch sent ripples through carefully maintained biological barriers, creating patterns that no risk management algorithm could approve.

Cala moved closer, defying every carefully calculated safety margin. The air between them crackled with uncontrolled reactions:

Around them, reality's careful categorizations began to blur. Their separate natures bled into each other, creating chemistry that no proper risk assessment would permit. Alerts filled the air like broken promises:

EMERGENCY: Biological containment compromised Unauthorized DNA recombination detected Pheromone levels exceeding permitted interspecies thresholds Immediate decontamination required

But they were already falling into each other, their forbidden touch rewriting every safety protocol. Vampire midnight met werewolf noon, creating impossible twilights that sent Oracle's biosecurity systems into cascading failure.

“Some error," Cala whispered against her fur, as his stone hard reality dissolve into hers, "are worth to COMMIT." His cold fingers traced her warm skin, sending emergency broadcasts through the local monitoring matrix:

Above them, Oracle's emergency beacons sputtered into static, then died one by one. In the darkness that followed, two hearts beat, 66.6 mm apart, in defiance of every protocol, every regulation, every carefully calculated rule that said their love was a biological hazard.

Tomorrow, they would face the consequences of their small revolution. But tonight, in their own pocket of denormalized reality, they were finally, perfectly, beautifully JOINED.

And not a single exception handler in the world could stop them.

—

The Bootrap swirled with random samples of joy and terror. In the bar's shifting light, she could almost see the shadows pooling wrong, like they had in Doc Ross's house. Almost feel the winter's call through the collar's suppression...

—

They found her three days later. The search party would never forget what was left in her study, where reality had begun to lose coherence at its edges. Her lower half hadn't simply merged with her chair – the boundaries between flesh and furniture breathed, pulsing with impossible geometries. Wood grain spiraled through skin like frozen rivers, while muscle fibers wove themselves into upholstery, creating patterns that hurt to look at. Sap and blood mingled in the grain, each heartbeat forcing out droplets that tasted of splinters and ironOne hand had become a love letter to her fire starter, fingers flowering into metal and flint The other had married her knife in a communion of calcium and steel – tools clutched so desperately they'd forgotten which was wielder and which was weapon, the blade's edge weeping rust-colored tears that sang with her pulse.

And her eyes... she'd done that herself. The knife-that-was-hand showed terrible clarity in those cuts. Whether to shield herself from witnessing her own unraveling, or because what she'd already seen had shattered the mirror of her sanity, no one could say. The empty sockets seemed to weep shadows that refused to fall, leaving trails of void-black frost on her cheeks.

They burned it all at dawn. Had to. Fire was the First Rememberer, never forgot its ancient contract with form. Its hunger was too pure, too primal to lose resolution – every flame a snippet of code written in the universe's first language, danced the story of before-time, when the first wolf gave herself to the earth and rose again as the first tree.

Crude stood with the others, forced to watch as reality reasserted itself through the cleansing apocalypse of flame, the heat tasting of certainty on her tongue. The smoke spoke in wolf-tongue: here was aunt who ran with thunder, now risen tall in birch-bark silver. Here was grandfather who taught the hunt, his pine-pitch blood sweet with old victories. Each tree held a wolf's lifetime of memories, and now those memories rose in cinder and spark, falling back to earth as wisdom-ash.

"Look. Look and remember," Old Moira murmured, the ancient words rough as bark on her tongue. "From flesh to wood to flame to knowing. Each pawstep marks the earth with choice - this path safe, that path dangerous. Each wolf's run carves wisdom into the world's bark." Her voice carried the weight of centuries, heavy as winter snow on pine boughs. "We run as wolves to write our knowing on the land. Where we mark becomes where saplings rise, each tree grown from choices made in starlight and storm, from heaven to earth.”

This is why they run in the dark, with forms that know themselves truly. Each wolf's path becomes a tree of knowing, and together we grow forests of memory.

This was why they called themselves the Cinder-Born - not for the burning, but for the learning that came after. Their ancestors gave themselves to the running, to the growing, to the burning, so every cinder might carry a spark of their learned truths back to the waiting earth. This was how they survived the claiming dark - not as lone wolves, but as forests of shared knowing, each tree a decision grown from love and necessity, each burning a teaching as old as the first wolf who dared to run and mark and choose and grow.

—

They dragged what remained to the ocean's edge, where waves darker than charred bone lapped at the shore with patient hunger. Her body still twitched, defying the fire's certainty, each spasm sending ripples through flesh that couldn't quite remember its proper boundaries. No tree-becoming for her, no gentle transformation into bark and branch to watch over future generations. Unlike their ancestors who stood sentinel in the forests, roots deep in memory-rich soil, she would be consigned to the depths where even shadows went to drown.

"The dark must keep its own," the elders intoned, their words barely louder than the ocean's breathing. Each wave pulled at the shore like a tongue testing its teeth, tasting the ash-laden air. The water was wrong here – too thick, too hungry, rolling with the viscous patience of ancient predators. It swallowed her without ceremony, without splash, the surface tension breaking like black silk around her form before sealing seamlessly above.

But Crude couldn't bear to let the darkness swallow everything whole. In defiance of tradition's cold wisdom, she drew her burning fingers across driftwood smoothed by a thousand tides, carving a single eye into its pale flesh. The wood sighed beneath her touch, remembering when it stood tall and green, remembering how it once watched seasons turn. Each leaves fall like pages in an ancient book, but the wisdom lie within the woods. Each stroke fell precise despite her trembling hands, as if the wood itself guided her claws, eager to wake from its long dreaming into this new purpose. It would become her eye, her witness, her defiance against the dark's hunger for memories.

When she cast it into the waters after the body, it became a star, abandoning its cold heaven to bear closer witness. The carved pupil, wide with mortal understanding, caught the last light like tears as it settled into its vigil – no longer eternal, but present in a way eternity could never be.

They retreated as custom demanded, walking backwards up the beach, each step measured and careful. No one turned their back on these waters – not where the horizon bent wrong against the sky, not where the darkness grew teeth. Salt-heavy air clung to their fur, thick with the taste of scorching iron.

The ocean stretched before them, darker than charcoal, darker than closed eyes, darker than the spaces between thoughts. Its surface moved wrong, thick and viscous like half-congealed guilt, waves folding into themselves with the wet sound of swallowed screams. The carved eye bobbed once, twice, a final wink of wooden defiance before the waters claimed it, pulling it down with deliberate hunger. Even the splash seemed muffled, as if the darkness digested sound itself.

The ocean would keep her, the elders promised. Keep her, and with luck, keep her sleeping, bound in currents too deep for dreams to reach.

—

Around 20,000 years ago, things stopped staying themselves in the dark, when watching-eyes loosened their grip on the world's throat. Her People named it Great Forgetting, though Mam always spat after saying those words, like they tasted of betrayal.

Crude remembered the night Mam had packed their meager belongings, her hands shaking as she wrote a letter to the half-brother Crude barely knew. "The wee one needs proper schooling," she'd explained in wolf-tongue, though her eyes kept darting to the corners where shadows pooled like spilled ink. "Needs a place where two and two make four, every time, no matter who's counting."

The world had forgotten how to be itself, Mam said. Like a lass who'd looked in too many mirrors and lost track of her true face. In the light, where folk could see it proper, reality strutted about like a peacock, every detail crisp as new snow. But come darkness, it turned uncertain as a drunk trying to find his way home, stumbling between what-was and what-might-have-been.

Some things held fast – the mountains, stars, ancient trees with memories longer than bloodlines. But newer things? Ach, they flickered like candlelight in wind, especially in those endless polar nights when even the wolves forgot their songs. Only watching, smelling, and experiencing , could hold things steady, each pair of eyes like a nail hammering the world in place.

Crude first saw SUS's reality engines on the ship Mam had paid for with her wedding ring. Great humming boxes that sorted the world into tables and charts, everything ranked and indexed like books in Doc Ross's library. "Premium persistence algorithms," the crew called them, though to Crude's young eyes they looked like iron coffins for dreams. The rich folk's cabins stayed perfect as summer days, while in steerage, reality crackled at the edges like frost on windows.

"Better this than watching your wee one's face blur in the dark," Mam had whispered, holding Crude close as their old world fell away behind them. She'd taught Crude to speak proper SUS-words then, drilling her until "reality maintenance" and "system stability" rolled off her tongue smooth as river stones. But sometimes, in dreams, Crude still heard her half-brother's wolf-song calling across waters too wide for even echoes to cross.

Crude were told by a drunk janitor, the wealthy bought their certainty in bottles and boxes, stored their memories in what they called "Hadoop Horcrux networks" - seven backups for every precious moment, because heaven forbid reality should hiccup during their garden parties. For truly fearful ones, something called an "SSD phylactery" kept their essential selves sharp as new pins, humming away in vaults deep as guilt.

For folk like them, new-come and copper-poor, reality flickered like bad theatre lighting, held together by what the maintenance workers called "Hamming code" - patches for the holes where certainty leaked out. "Be grateful," Mam would say, counting their meager reality-maintenance coins. "Better a patched world than none at all." But Crude remembered how her mother's hands would shake each time she paid their monthly certainty bill, how her eyes would go distant and wolf-wild, remembering a world where reality might be uncertain, aye, but at least it was free.

This is tangential, but Harry uses the proof by induction on positive integers to prove to Dumbledore that people want to live forever. I think if we were just to look for evidence in stories, we would find that in vampire stories one of the most appealing aspects is immortality that includes eternal youth. So if that's not evidence I don't know what is

We learn at the end of the story that Dumbledore "killed" Harry's pet rock when he was 6, but why would the prophecies instruct him to do that? What consequences does it have other than Harry not wanting a pet? Is it just another thing that contributes to him developing "heroic responsibility"?

They found her three days later. The search party would never forget what was left in her study, where reality had begun to lose coherence at its edges. Her lower half hadn't simply merged with her chair – the boundaries between flesh and furniture breathed, pulsing with impossible geometries. Wood grain spiraled through skin like frozen rivers, while muscle fibers wove themselves into upholstery, creating patterns that hurt to look at. Sap and blood mingled in the grain, each heartbeat forcing out droplets that tasted of splinters and ironOne hand had become a love letter to her fire starter, fingers flowering into metal and flint The other had married her knife in a communion of calcium and steel – tools clutched so desperately they'd forgotten which was wielder and which was weapon, the blade's edge weeping rust-colored tears that sang with her pulse.

And her eyes... she'd done that herself. The knife-that-was-hand showed terrible clarity in those cuts. Whether to shield herself from witnessing her own unraveling, or because what she'd already seen had shattered the mirror of her sanity, no one could say. The empty sockets seemed to weep shadows that refused to fall, leaving trails of void-black frost on her cheeks.

They burned it all at dawn. Had to. Fire was the First Rememberer, the element that never forgot its ancient contract with form. Its hunger was too pure, too primal to lose resolution – every flame a snippet of code written in the universe's first language, crackling with the syntax of destruction and rebirth. Crude stood with the others, forced to watch as reality reasserted itself through the cleansing apocalypse of flame, the heat tasting of certainty on her tongue. The smoke carried memories of what was burned – wood, flesh, possibility – all reduced to the same fundamental truth of cinder, who grant their name to wolfs so they can remember those they never seen.

"Look," the elders commanded, their voices harmonizing with the fire's crackling song. "Look and remember. This is why we change in the dark months. This is why we run with forms that know themselves truly, that remember the shape of their souls even when the world forgets itself.”

—

They dragged what remained to the ocean's edge, where waves darker than charred bone lapped at the shore with patient hunger. Her body still twitched, defying the fire's certainty, each spasm sending ripples through flesh that couldn't quite remember its proper boundaries. No tree-becoming for her, no gentle transformation into bark and branch to watch over future generations. Unlike their ancestors who stood sentinel in the forests, roots deep in memory-rich soil, she would be consigned to the depths where even shadows went to drown.

"The dark must keep its own," the elders intoned, their words barely louder than the ocean's breathing. Each wave pulled at the shore like a tongue testing its teeth, tasting the ash-laden air. The water was wrong here – too thick, too hungry, rolling with the viscous patience of ancient predators. It swallowed her without ceremony, without splash, the surface tension breaking like black silk around her form before sealing seamlessly above.

But Crude, her claws still smoking from the fire-watching, couldn't bear the thought of that blindness. In defiance of tradition, she carved a single eye into a strip of driftwood, each stroke precise despite her trembling hands. The wood remembered being tree, remembered watching, and took easily to its new purpose. It will become her stolen eye.

When she cast it into the waters after the body, it became a star, abandoning its cold heaven to bear closer witness. The carved pupil, wide with mortal understanding, caught the last light like tears as it settled into its vigil – no longer eternal, but present in a way eternity could never be.

They retreated as custom demanded, walking backwards up the beach, each step measured and careful. No one turned their back on these waters – not where the horizon bent wrong against the sky, not where the darkness grew teeth. Salt-heavy air clung to their fur, thick with the taste of iron and entropy.

The ocean stretched before them, darker than charcoal, darker than closed eyes, darker than the spaces between thoughts. Its surface moved wrong, thick and viscous like half-congealed guilt, waves folding into themselves with the wet sound of swallowed screams. The carved eye bobbed once, twice, a final wink of wooden defiance before the waters claimed it, pulling it down with deliberate hunger. Even the splash seemed muffled, as if the darkness digested sound itself.

The ocean would keep her, the elders promised. Keep her, and with luck, keep her sleeping, bound in currents too deep for dreams to reach.

—

Around 20,000 years ago, things stopped staying themselves in the dark, when observation loosened its grip on reality's throat. People named it Deconstruction, when it was still young enough to need a name. Object permanence became more precious than gold, a resource hoarded and maintained through endless observation, desperate ritual, or, in SUS, the mathematical prayers of error-correcting code.

That was SUS's great promise – reality maintenance as public utility, stability sold by the kilowatt-hour. Even the poorest citizens received their daily ration of basic Hamming code protection, enough to keep their homes and possessions from dissolving into quantum uncertainty each night. The rich bought premium persistence algorithms, their realities clean and crisp as mountain air, while the poor made do with realities that occasionally flickered at the corners. But everyone got something.

Better to live under Oracle's monopoly than watch your children's faces forget themselves in the dark.

The world had forgotten its own architecture, lost the parameters of its being. Like a neural network with Alzheimer, it could only maintain coherence through constant observation, each a training signal, teaching reality how to remain itself. In the light, where witnesses abounded, the world confident forward propagated through its layers of existence, each moment predicting the next with assured certainty. But in darkness, in the spaces between attention, it began to backward propagate through its own history, unlearning its patterns, dissolving into older, stranger geometries.

The boundary between real and imaginary became a question of weights – how strongly a thing remembered its own shape, how deeply it had been etched into the universe's parameters by generations of watching. Trees, mountains, stars – these had been observed so long they had grown heavy with certainty, their weights too massive to easily shift. But newer things, things that lived in the margins of attention, could slip between states like quantum uncertainties, their weights fluctuating between being and unbeing with each unobserved moment.

In the darkest places, where even probability lost its grip, the backward propagation could reach all the way down to first principles, unmaking things layer by layer until they forgot not just their shape, but the very concept of having shape at all. Only observation could halt this entropic descent, each conscious moment acting as a loss function, measuring the distance between what was and what should be, adjusting reality's weights until it remembered how to exist once more.

In chapter 115, Harry thinks about "fence-post security". Voldemort was obsessed with immortality and preventing his own death, so he used horcruxes, which protect against death. If one horcrux protects you against death to a moderate degree, multiple horcruxes protect you against death to a greater degree. But the problem with scaling up this strategy much further is that it does nothing about threats that horcruxes don't protect against.

More than a hundred horcruxes.

That had been insane, there wasn't any other word for it, a sign of Voldemort's damaged thinking about death. A Muggle security expert would have called it fence-post security, like building a fence-post over a hundred metres high in the middle of the desert. Only a very obliging attacker would try to climb the fence-post. Anyone sensible would just walk around the fence-post, and making the fence-post even higher wouldn't stop that.

Once you forgot to be scared of how impossible the problem was supposed to be, it wasn't even difficult, not by comparison to the last one.

Neville's parents, for example, had been Crucioed into permanent insanity. Two hundred advanced horcruxes wouldn't prevent that insanity, they would all just echo the same damaged mind.

Other examples:

• I'm building a bridge over a wide canyon, and I really don't want the bridge to break or fall over. Therefore, I spend one thousand times as much money on construction to make the materials 100x stronger. I'm still not satisfied, so I spend one billion times as much money on construction to make the materials 1000x stronger. However, the extra money was wasted, because by the time the bridge was 100x stronger than a normal bridge, the bridge itself was already not going to break, and I've done nothing about the now more relevant dangers of the bridge falling over due to the sides of the canyon eroding, or an earthquake or asteroid knocking it over.
• I have some extremely important data, and I will spare no expense to ensure that I can access it no matter what. I have it stored on a hard drive with a failure rate of 1 in 100 years. So I decide to back it up onto another hard drive, thinking the failures are uncorrelated so the rate decreases to 1 loss per 10000 years. I back it up onto a hundred, then a thousand hard drives, confident that I'll never lose my data because the risk of all the drives to break simultaneously is astronomically small, only once per 100^1000 years, vastly longer than the age of the universe, so it will never happen. But this is wrong, because all of the hard drives could be lost in a correlated way, such as burglars stealing all of them, or a solar flare destroying all of the electronics on Earth, and I've done nothing to protect against these other risks.

Is this concept written about anywhere else?

I think this is quite a bit neglected in the story. I think, Mr. Verres and his care is one of the main source of Harry's rationality. Voldemort never get to learn about physics or rigorous logic. One of the main thing that sealed Voldemort's fate is Harry's capability to do partial transformation. Not only it was one of the thing "Dark Lord knows not", it's something no Wizards ever thought before. And it's impossible to do without Harry knowing pretty advanced physics. Harry gotto learn that only thanks to Dr. Verres and his care. But I feel like his contributions were not even properly implied.

Maybe this was obvious to a lot of you, but I realized recently that one of the most memorable HPMOR quotes is probably a Discworld reference:

HPMOR - "There is no justice in the laws of Nature, Headmaster, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to! We care! There is light in the world, and it is us!"

Reaper Man - "LORD, WE KNOW THERE IS NO GOOD ORDER EXCEPT THAT WHICH WE CREATE....

Azrael's expression did not change.

THERE IS NO HOPE BUT US. THERE IS NO MERCY BUT US. THERE IS NO JUSTICE. THERE IS JUST US.

The dark, sad face filled the sky.

ALL THINGS THAT ARE ARE OURS. BUT WE MUST CARE. FOR IF WE DO NOT CARE, WE DO NOT EXIST. IF WE DO NOT EXIST, THEN THERE IS NOTHING BUT BLIND OBLIVION."

I mean "proved". Am I worrying about the spoilers too much?

So, when most part of what's you're talking about sounds logical and believeble, it's easy to automatically trust to all of your conclusions. But Harry's point in chapter 23 was that it's just knowledges are lost. Malfoy thought that it was the ruin of the "pureblood theory", but it wasn't.

Interbreeding with muggles as the result of an experiment would always cause decreasing of magical abilities in children to squibs, and interbreeding with squibs will get a half of your children to loose magic down to squibs. As the result, the more marriages would have wizards with non-wizards, the less wizards would be on the world and some day the "magic" gene would be lost. The only point against the Deatheaters' position is that the "mudblood" wizards are actually pureblood and they should be kept as valuable gene resources.

I'm expecting that I may be wrong in some place and hope someone here would help me to correct my conclusions. Because the only reason I see (for now) why author choosed this way, was to highlight the imperfection of the Harry as the character, which makes him more believable.

I recently learned about The Fooming Shoggoths and since I've always been interested in both music and AI, I decided to create my own take on HPMOR music!

This isn't really 'rationalist music', just a rock ballad that tries to capture the spirit of Godric's idea of heroism. The song is called The Fireman and I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I did making it!

What got me thinking about this was the fact that Quirrell is a snake animagus. But we learn from Voldemort that he had almost lost hope at ever having a body again when Quirrell stumbled over one of his horcruxes. So Voldemort jumped at the first opportunity. We know that animagi are rare and the probability of stumbling over a snake animagus is really small. So then is the animagus form anchored to the soul? Or do you have to go through the process of becoming an animagus each time you get a new body, and the soul only determines your form? And I can also imagine that you need both soul and body to turn into an animal, so that the real Quirrel couldn't have changed after Voldemort stopped posessing him.

I've got an insight on how it might actually work.

The Stone stayed there for a time, minutes at least. The irregular chunk of red glass did not glow, or flash, or give any other indication of power.

Then the Stone moved, just a little, turning slightly upon the body.

Let's say it has turned around for about 1 degree.

Once you know how it works, the Stone can do one complete restoration to full health and youth every two hundred and thirty-four seconds. Three hundred sixty people per day.

360 degrees per day huh? (my calculations say 368 or 369 actually). Seems like it's bound to Earth's rotation around its axis, maybe adjusted with its orbital rotation, maybe also adjusted with Sun's rotation around the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center of the Milky Way, maybe etc.

What do you think?

PS doesn't seem to be any spoiler here

UPD from a practical standpoint, it might mean that we can easily increase its daily use throughput by having it on a spaceship on low earth orbit

In chapter 23 of HPMOR, Draco casts Gom Jabbar on Harry. I assumed this meant Dune didn't exist in HPMOR-verse, because otherwise Harry would've been like "What the fuck Frank Herbert is a wizard!?". But in Significant Digits, Harry starts reading God Emperor of Dune!

Harry returned to God-Emperor of Dune, and read quietly for some time.

So Dune does exist in Sig Digs canon! Does that mean is Frank Herbert a wizard? Did a Dark Wizard read Dune and get inspired to invent a dark torture hex!?

u/alexanderdeeb important worldbuilding pls wog

^(Here's a first draft at writing a small continuation of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I love the story so much I decided to try my hand at mimicking the style of the author, Eliezer Yudkowsky, with my own spin on the philosophy that informs it. It's been quite fun and presents a lively challenge. If you have any ideas at all about how to improve things or things you would like to see, feel free to start up a conversation with me in the comments. (I'll need all the help I can get!))

^(And now, without further delay:)

Harry Potter and The Vault of Hopefully Not Eternity

Chapter one: Red Team 22/7 and the Infohazardous List

“Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.”

		“The problem with experiments 

involving the end of the world 

is that they may only happen 

once 

and there can be no peer review.”

Supreme Mugwump Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres-Granger sat on his crystalline throne on the Moon and began thrumbing his fingers rhythmically while scowling in concentration, beguiled as to how they were all still alive.

Technically it wasn't a throne per se… every other chair in the topmost crystalline geodesic hemisphere had precisely the same properties, namely that they all contoured to a person's body so as to ergonomically spread the pressure of one's weight evenly across the surface of their back and buttocks, making the hard diamond surface (10 on the Mohs scale) feel delicately soft, but Harry had come to think of this one, closest to the backmost focus of the elliptical table and furthest from the door, as just that.

The occupants of the other 21 chairs looked equally uncomfortable (of no fault of the chairs, Harry was sure) although it was becoming clear that it was Harry's own restlessness that was putting them on edge. Madame Bones, Mad Eye Moody, Hermione Granger, Severus Snape, the Weasley twin group mind, a portrait of Professor Albus Dumbledore, Professor Flitwick, Headmasters and mistresses Minerva McGonagall, Igor Karcorov of Durmstrang, Madame Maxine of Beubattons, Agilbert Fontaine of Ilvermorny, professor Max Tegmark of MIT, Autherior Genson of the wizarding Spatalien School, Xiao Meng of Tibet’s Grand Mystic Academy, and (as he planned soon to explain) six time-turned, freshly memory-wiped, and ideatically-randomized versions of Harry himself — all had been gathered, some very nearly against their wills, but had been wrangled from sometimes very busy schedules nonetheless.

“How and why are there seven of you?” asked a curious voice with a slight accent.

“Excellent question, professor Tegmark.”

Harry gave Madame Bones a quick look that said, "see why he's here?”

“I'll explain in just a moment, but first, Madame Bones, Alastair Moody, do you have the devices?”

“Harry, I must again urge you to consider the strategic vulnerability of having all these in the same location. It would take one single fiend fire curse to kill us all and take them with us.”

“I'm sorry Alastair, but I couldn't risk long-distance communication for this one — too many potential vulnerabilities.”

“Very well,” conceded Moody, but he didn’t look happy about it.

Madame Bones took out a box the size of one that would fit a ring for a wedding proposal. It was small, but clearly heavily enchanted. From the way Harry saw her place the box on the table you could tell that it was far heavier than its size would ordinarily permit.

Moody was crossing his arms in protest until Harry gave him a particular look. “Oh, alright,” he grumbled darkly. And he took his head in hand and popped out his own eyeball, placing the madly swiveling orb into an equally sized orifice in the top of the box which opened to reveal a polished red metal whistle. “Happy?” he asked, one eye-socket empty in the scared half of his face. Madam Bones rolled her own eyes and took the whistle, then pulled a very tall box out of the small one, from which she hefted a very tall very wide box, from which she heaved and slid a very tall very wide very long box — a chest of drawers in fact, with 15 locks on 15 little drawers, each of which opened into 15 differently located cabinets somewhere in the control of the Department of Mysteries on Earth. Max Tegmark said something praising the brilliantly clever deployable mechanisms as Bones blew the whistle shortly.

15 heavily armored house elves apparated instantly in front of her. (Apparently armor didn’t quite count as clothing, Harry noted.) Max Tegmark fainted in surprise and Madame Bones returned Harry’s look. Each house elf had a slightly different colored key on a chain tightly wound around one of their spindly arms. One by one they opened the drawers and there inside were 15 time-turner's of various shape and make.

Harry spoke up now: “We're here to brainstorm ways that magic could be used to cause human extinction or else lead to a permanent curtailment of human flourishing. These ways are so dangerous that even knowledge about them needs to be tightly controlled, and so you must all consent to delayed-effect self-administered memory-wipes of this meeting prior to further disclosure of specifics. Until then though, have any of you seen Disney’s Fantasia 2000 or the 1940s version? Maybe read the original Goethe poem? Or maybe heard a wizard version of the Germanic myth The Sorcerer’s Apprentice? It’s a potent depiction of a foolish sorcerer’s apprentice who, while playing with his master’s magic hat to accomplish a mundane task, he casts some relatively basic magic which quickly spirals out of control.”

“Harry,” said Hermione, “among wizard-kind you’re describing not one story, but an entire genre of wizard literature. There are literally hundreds of fables that fit that description.”

“Ok, good. So far the only thing that I think has stopped that kind of thing from happening to the entire world is the lack of widespread knowledge about magical potential energy and the fact that anyone bright enough to realize it also likely realizes that being alive for longer rather than shorter better achieves their particular aims.

But we can't expect this to last. What the death eaters have shown is that even relatively small groups of extremists, if commanded by competent leadership, even a single individual, can have an outsized effect with existential consequences for the rest of the world.”

“The boy must be mad!” exclaimed Igor Karcorov. “He wants us to help him destroy the world!”

“Well you would know all about that, wouldn't you Karcorov?” Madeye growled.

Harry slapped his own forehead and then, shaking his head, continued his explanation.

“No! I'm trying to prevent the world from being destroyed. Honestly I have no idea how it hasn't been already, there are so many ways it could happen - but you can't avert something that you haven't even thought of.”

Now Madeye spoke up again: “The boy is right. To secure the safety of the world from Death Eaters and the like it's necessary to think as dark wizards do.”

“Harry?”, began one Weasley twin, “why are we,” continued the other, “on the Moon?” they concluded together, voicing what most of the others had been thinking.

“Right, that'll be for the secrecy and the safety for and from the rest of the world. Also, I've always wanted to go here for purposes of scientific research” he said “...and because it's extremely friggin cool to hold a conference on another astronomical body,” he thought to himself. He'd really been getting better at keeping certain parts of his speech unsaid lately, Harry thought to himself.

“I still don't understand why there are 7 of you,” complained a mildly confunded Tegmark, having recovered from fainting at this point.

“I'm getting to that. So-”

“Mr. Potter, is it really wise to have a - a muggle in our midst?” opined Professor McGonagall.

“I think it is.” Harry said shortly. “I need a wide range of thinking to cover as many potentially viable existential risks as possible. Really we should have merpeople and centaurs as well as house elves and goblins - but I don’t have any contacts there so for now this will have to do. Professor Tegmark is an expert on emerging technologies in the Muggle world. His input is invaluable.”

“And we were going to Massachusetts for access to Ilvermorny anyway and figured we might as well stop at MIT while we were there,” he did not say.

Hermione had raised her hand.

Harry sighed. “Yes, Hermione?”

“Are those for us?” She was pointing at the time-turner's.

“Yes, and if all of you will-”

“You can't seriously expect the ministry to just Give you all the time turners at the drop of a-” Madam Bones began.”

“They’re just for a single use - although we really need to talk about the risk they pose if mis-use—”

“But why are there Seven of —”

“Silencio,” said Harry, trying to cast two-seconds of quiet over the room to get his plan elaborated in edgewise.

The spell broke immediately as some of the world's most knowledgeable and powerful magic users rose a deafening ruckus and Harry, stunned by the disorderly clamor, looked on in dismay.

“SILENCE!” roared the elderly bearded wizard with half-moon spectacles in the large portrait propped on one of the crystalline chairs.

The room froze.

In a very soft voice, so that everyone quieted down to hear him, the portrait of Albus Dumbledore spoke, “I believe Harry has something of critical and complex importance he would like desperately to share with each of us. Harry, am I right?”

“Yes. Thank you, Albus.” began Harry, relieved. 

“You see, I'm making a list, a list whose items will be invisible to all except those who are already privy to them — in other words, all except those who've already thought of them. It is powerfully charmed to prevent anyone from sharing those items with any except those who can already see them. The items on the list are theoretical ways to permanently destroy the world or universe or enslave all its peoples or perpetuate extreme suffering or else reduce universal happiness below an acceptable level for an indefinite period of time.”

Concerned looks spread around the room. “Permanently destroy the world”?

With a wave of his wand Harry summoned 22 floating pool-like disks with mirror-like surfaces as blank and glassed over as the eyes of most of the people assembled, into the room. Hermione recognized them immediately. “Those are pensives, aren’t they Harry?” He nodded. “Is anyone not familiar with these? Raise your hand.” Fred and George, as well as Max Tegmark raised their hands a little sheepishly. Hermione raised a hand instinctively and began explaining, “Pensives are pools for reflecting on one’s memories. You take a trace of a memory from your temple with the tip of your wand and place it in the liquid and the pensive can replay the memory perfectly without any distortion of clarity even decades or centuries after the events to which they pertain. They’re used typically by elderly wizards who are afraid of losing their memories and by some as a sort of insurance policy against obliviation curses.” “Very good, Hermione.” praised Dumbledore’s portrait. “I will add only that they can be used by others than just the original possessors of the memories, that they can contain the memories of muggles like Professor Tegmark, that they are quite deeply immersive, and that their use is strictly banned in all pub trivia contests of which I am aware.”

“Thank you Hermione and, um, Albus. Now, as Supreme Mugwump of the Wizengamot I take up the totem of power and task each and every one of you…” Harry looked over at Fred and George “and… pair of you… with the duty to think up these ways together, write those you do not already see on the list, cast a trace of the memory of them into your pensive, and then… then obliviate your own memory of having devised them. You will then time turn your way back to this prompt 3 minutes from now. [disambiguate]” Harry turned over a large digital hourglass, which immediately began flowing sand upwards and displaying the time elapsed in large violet roman numerals.

“This will allow you to come up with fresh ideas and keep coming up with fresh ideas, instead of getting stuck on those you've already come up with. Typically solutions are “mentally sticky” and once you land on a couple of them it’s hard to think of anything else. I first came up with the idea of resetting memory to generate new ideas after reading case reports of patients with head trauma or neurological disease who were experiencing short-term memory loss. Typically they ask the same questions, make the same observations, and think the same exact thoughts over and over again, like a broken record or a wind-up toy. They present a compelling demonstration of the deterministic nature of human thought as a process influenced both by environmental factors and neurobiological ones. Their ability to “reset” their thoughts and their apparent immunity to the “stickiness” of thoughts they’ve had before is of great interest to me. If you tell them a joke 7 times in a row they’ll laugh at the punchline as hard on the 7th time as on the first. That means they get 7 free shots at experiencing something for the first time. Beginner’s mind again and again. Ordinarily they repeat the same things over and over, as you can imagine. But they remain responsive to changes in the details of their environment. Ask them the same question in slightly different ways and they’ll give you sometimes significantly different responses. This is true also of poll questionnaires used to determine public opinion. The details of the phrasing really matter to the answers you get!

So I got to wondering what would best vary their outputs. And I found by experimenting with very weak obliviation charms on myself that different music played in the background - especially very emotional, very broadly appealing music - while also varying the phrasing of questions - was the best way to do it. I even found that I could come up with better ideas for varying the ideas, taking things to a meta-level, by using the best ideas for varying the ideas I’d already had and recursively iterating the process. I call it Ideatic Randomization."

Everyone in the room, including Hermione, the portrait of Dumbledore, and the various headmasters and headmistresses of the different magical schools now looked at Harry in a kind of blank-faced shock. Only the Weasley twins seemed unsurprised. “So you came up with a better way” said either Fred or George “of coming up with better ways” said either George or Fred, “of coming up with stuff,” they finished together. “Yeah, pretty much,” said Harry.

“That, Professor Tegmark, is why there are 7 of me.”

At this, and with the hourglass reading 3 minutes, the room began to fill with time-turned copies of witches, wizards, and an extremely confused, but quite enthused MIT professor of physics and emerging technology.

And so began one of the strangest conferences in all of magical history, which, considering all the strange conferences Harry had read about in A History of Magic and Hogwarts: A History, was really rather remarkable.

…

After somewhere between 2 and 10 consecutive hours (depending on whose perspective one took) of confusing, but extremely productive brainstorming, debate, theoretical squabbling, academic argumentation, terrifying experimentation around the plausibility of several dozen hypotheticals, list scribbling, mental straining, and memory manipulation, they finally reached a point of quiet headaches as each, more exhausted than they could remember anticipating, set their pens down and reclaimed their memories from their pensives, then looked upon the list, written upon a rhodium scroll, they had compiled.

At the top of the list were a set of items called self-perpetuating charms and curses. For example:

• a run-away imperious curse (by which a victim becomes, for a time, a kind of pseudo-philosophical zombie enthralled to the command of a caster, Harry noted) that results in further imperious cursing, consuming its original caster and becoming undispellable. (Harry was absolutely shocked that this had never happened before, at least according to the various professors, and made a mental note to check the history books again with an eye for any sort of mental blight that could be explained by recursive imperiousing and which might have been averted by some method that could be rediscovered.) 

This section also included:

• the gemino charm, a simple but powerful way of duplicating an object. If the object could be made to refresh the energy of the charm that allowed it to duplicate it risked unbounded exponential growth that would overwhelm the Earth within a few days.

Yet another was 

• the fiend-fire curse, with the “fiend” in question made to be a fast-replicating insect or microorganism.

“The speed of insect cell replication is what gives rise to plagues of swarming insects, like cicadas every 17 years. Imagine such a swarm of large flying insects like a cicada or boll weevil, or even a large flock of birds, except they're made out of fire – like a forest fire that has swarm intelligence.” Harry said with the same enthusiasm as someone finding clever ways to play Magic, the Gathering.

Further down were 

• Runaway homunculus creation, and non-human infiri used en masse to produce more dead to make more infiri from. 

And,

• Something like an “undilutable” potion that, Ice-9-like, transfigures the ocean and all fluid on earth into more of itself.
• Magic used to create a self-sustaining nuclear fission or fusion reaction in bare rock, water, wood, or air OR transfiguration of large amounts of normal materials into radioactive piles.
• The transfiguration of any amount of matter into antimatter.
• A gamma-ray version of the standard Lumos Maxima spell taught to every bright 2nd-year student at Hogwarts.
• Airing a basilisk stare or adult mandrake cry over hijacked mass-telecommunication satellites or central internet-carrying fiber-optic cables. “Again, you’re telling me that one of these creatures is considered so extremely dangerous that you have legends about it stretching back more than 400-years and the other you have 2nd-year students handling in herbology class? The mandrakes are more dangerous than the basilisks!”

“Hang on,” Engelbert Fontaine had piped up. “The curses are limited by the strength of the curse and so the power of the wielder.”

“Yes, well, about that, next up on the list are ways of channeling natural sources of magical energy both terrestrial and Cosmic in origin. I've been doing research into energetic invariance involved in the limitations of various forms of magic and what I found is that the potential for spells that channel natural sources to go awry far exceeds what has been previously suspected. Just as a stick of butter can release the energetic equivalent of TNT if oxidized rapidly, so too may natural sources of magical potential be liberated on very short time scales. In other words, there may exist rituals that can Melt the Earth's Crust.” (“wicked” whispered either Fred to George or George to Fred) “and—” and the list went on for 14 distinct items.

“Now we just put a powerful, global jinx trace on some of those terms unique to items on the list – the same way Voldemort put one on his own name – that way we can stop existential threats to the world as soon as they’re first mentioned. I mean, can you imagine that anyone could possibly mean any good by talking about something like, oh! Here’s a new one: dropping a heat-proofed vanishing cabinet into the core of the Sun and leaving the other on Earth.”

It was at this exact moment, and no earlier, that 18 little pops occurred inside the supposedly secure hemisphere and filled the room with unusually powerful stunning curses.

“Oh. Right. Crap.” said Harry a brief moment before he too was stunned motionless.

Chapter 1.5: The Unspeakably Dangerous Mild Inconvenience

The Shriners of the Unspeakable Mysteries was not an especially optimized fraternal organization, but they’d been around for a long time nevertheless. Technically they were a branch of the wizard version of the shriners, themselves a type of the masons, one of the few mostly-muggle organizations that had muggle members permitted to learn about the existence of some magic, though sworn (magically) not to reveal it to any but other high-level shriners. Their goal was to protect their shrines to the utmost of their abilities, plain and simple, and although some took this to mean only the renewal of simple protection charms and ensuring their locations were secret, others took their task very seriously indeed. The SotUMs focused their efforts on preventing the world from ending. After all, they reasoned, if the world ended, there would be no way to protect the shrines, so to carry out their deepest duty, what they really were sworn to, they would argue, was to prevent this end. It was only a single person, a man named Ernest Airdoze, who had thought of a way that this could actually happen- and it involved dropping a heavily heat-proofed vanishing cabinet into the heart of the nearest star, sol, the sun — and leaving the other on Earth. It was his brother, Tesel, who had had the thought to place an extremely powerful and sensitive jinx trace on every version he could think of of the phrase “heat-proofed vanishing cabinet dropped into the core of the sun” — in the hopes that they could find such a maniac as would attempt to utter such a phase and stop them in their tracks before anything like that could happen.

“Wait a minute… is that… ALBUS! Merlin’s Pubes! What off Earth are You doing here?!”

 “Mmmhmmhmmhm”

“Oh, Right, Crap - we muffled him.”

And one of the 18 Shriners cast away the muffling curse.

“Good evening, Geralmo, Augustine, Beuford. Would you mind please un-stunning my co-conspirators, starting with the 13-year-old Harry over there.”

“Right. Terribly sorry about that.” said the heavily bearded old purple-robbed wizard Dumbledore’s portrait had referred to as Beuford. “I’ll just, um…”

A moment later Harry was unstunned.

“You Know them?”

“Of course. Everybody over 130 or so knows each other. It’s really quite a small world.”

“Say, one of you didn’t happen to mention dropping a heavily-heat-resistant vanishing cabinet into the center of the sun, did you?”

Harry laughed nervously, then had to fight his way through that laughter to explain.

“Um, I think we’re on the same side. I was the one who mentioned dropping a heat-proofed vanishing cabinet into the core of the sun, but it was only in the interest of brainstorming existential risks posed by magic in order to prevent them.”

“Oh, good…” Beuford trailed off, realizing that he could see the ball of the Earth overhead. “Am I… Are we… On the Moon?”

“Small world indeed.” said one of the heavily bearded, old, purple-robbed figures, mystified.

Chapter 2 sneak peek: H.A.A.R.I.

“The High-Altitude Alchemical Research Institute is NOT in a state of zero gravity! And I wish you would stop saying it is!” Harry insisted to Professor Horace Slugghorn for the Nth time.

“It’s in Orbit — that means it's in a state of freefall in which its horizontal velocity keeps it falling Around the planet so as to preserve its altitude within a range along a curved path. Honestly, how did you become a professor without familiarity with Newtonian Gravity!”

“Well I say Harry,” said the professor, “this high and mighty theory sounds quite revolutionary, but I must admit I haven't the foggiest by what turn it has to do with potion making!”

“Please don't be too hard on him,” Hermione had urged him, but Harry was having a hard time controlling the urge to dash it all and leave Slughorn in the ignorance he was accustomed to. Upon quick self-assessment it was because it reminded him of talking to his father. An Oxford professor of biochemistry who refused to accept the serious existence of magic, there was a distinct gulf of respect and understanding between guardian and ward.

“Revolutionary my toe! State of the art back in 1680 or something. No wonder wizardkind hasn't explored space yet! And to answer your question, professor, starting from my own observations, the limits of classical potionmaking have primarily been due to impurities, the difficulty of sourcing materials, and frankly hideous attempts at standardized measurements.” Here Harry paused and began flipping to post-it-note-bookmarked pages at random.

“‘Half a bit of petrified wamping aspin’,” Harry began reading aloud: “‘a quarter pinch of pixie dust’”, “‘a nugget of pitchblende’” “‘sixteen good-sized drops of pigmy cockatrice secretions’ - oh, here’s my favorite: ‘a well-fed newt’s weight of dittany’!” — These protocols are almost completely irreproducible!

As for the impurities, they seem almost always to result from cauldron reactivity. Pewter is simply insufficient for the task, pyrex has limits to its ability to resist heat shock, not that anyone sells pyrex cauldrons… — even solid gold” (such as transfigured ingots rendered permanent by the sorcerer’s stone, Harry thought) “melts at high temperatures. No wonder students from poorer families are dramatically more likely to fail potions classes: they don’t have access to any materials nearly sufficient for the subject! Originally I'd thought I could get around that by using platinum, ruby, and pure quartz vessels calibrated with massing scales and micropipettes, but I quickly found that magical reactivity works rather differently from chemical or even nuclear reactivity. For example, after figuring out that vessels of all kinds were insufficient for the task of handling highly magically reactive solutions, I turned to levitating the contents of a potion — but as it turns out, the magic used to levitate the ingredients as the potion comes together itself gets infused into the potion as an impurity. And it’s exactly these highly reactive solutions that are most usefully capable of “dissolving” materials with distinct magical properties into one homogenous brew.

Have you ever seen polyethylene glycol or superfluid helium, professor? They are self-siphoning and the helium can drip through the microscopic pores of most vessels.

Creating potions in orbit around the moon allows me to get around the problem of containers entirely, especially useful for potions that are very good at escaping them.”

Slughorn looked down at Harry in utter shock. “My boy, do you have any idea what this means?!?”

“Yes — it means we’re going to have to contend with whatever passes for a supply chain among wizardkind.”

Okay so I've seen a lot of people going, over the whole thing with heaven and hell in hazbin hotel (hahahaha), that "how could the angels go to heaven if they abuse the people of hell this badly", which... Literally misses the whole point.

A system of morality through which you define who needs to be rewarded and who punished can pick stuff like lying, stealing, being unpleasant or uncaring or any other number of things (which does, on every level, have to include serving or submitting to a structure of power or morality different from the one that is formal, aka you need to "stick it to the man" if you're not in heaven, which does also analogously fit some real world situations) as morally condemnable, but it cannot pick abuse, not in and of itself. It cannot pick cruelty. It cannot pick the infliction of power.

Because this is what the ENTIRE FUCKING SYSTEM FUNCTIONS OVER!

(Screaming at a bunch of certain video essayists into a pillow for about ten minutes)

And yes, it can pick the infliction of cruelty over those who DIDN'T earn it by breaking a rule. But the whole point is that heaven abuses hell, which, by definition, does. THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT. You don't have to agree with it, but you cannot simply grossly misinterpret it.

The thing is, if you start applying nuances like individual circumstances... It really doesn't stop. Everybody has a reason, everybody has an inner world. The people in the US government who sent orders to assassin the leaders of other countries until they were thrown into chaos for generations probably don't deserve to burn in hell, but then, why? Because they are people who grew up to believe this was the way to run the world, who had people who loved them in their lives? So were Nazis! Does someone who grew up in a cult and got brainwashed into committing horrific acts of violence for the only structure that would keep their family safe "deserve it"? Hamas is the biggest supplier of employment and the most major source of information about the outside world in Gaza, how does that make you think about anyone who ended up murdering civilians in the 7th in October? Oil companies are gonna burn our fucking planet down, does that mean everyone involved in "the machine" deserve to die a brutal death? If you start viewing it as if there CAN be reasons for people to break the rules that don't mean they deserve to suffer... That eventually always means evil isn't a thing people ARE, it's a thing people DO.

And hpmor aknowlages that.

Azkaban is, in the world of hpmor, basically what hell is in hazbin hotel. It's the place where you stuff all the people who did bad things and torture them forever. It's a way of sustaining power, by clearly defining an ingroup that you're better from, and it was aknowlaged as such (what would the miserable creatures of Azkaban give any politician?).

Sometimes, evil must be committed to prevent more down the line. When a bunch of magic Nazis (who have families and children you're gonna have to look in the eyes of tomorrow) are pointing wands at you and will shoot if they see you move, and anything but killing them on the spot can risk you bring stopped from preventing the apocalypse, this is what you are morally required to do. They don't deserve to die, but they must. However, if you had magic Hitler who tore the world apart out of boredom at your mercy, and you could throw him into the torture chamber forever... Common wisdom would say you should, but really, this is just adding more cruelty. And if you cannot kill him, he deserves as much of your mercy as you can grant him. He was also a miserable creature. If you could afford to let him save any last piece of happiness, it would not be a sin.

Out of everything I ever saw, I really do think that this is the moral philosophy I am the most okay with.

Edit: also just for the record, no this isn't another "hazbin hotel is secretly deeper than the horny gay demons" take. The show has a moral philosophy behind some of its larger-scale conflict, but I am FULLY AWARE that the main cultural impact and thematic meaning that it had was about giving legitimacy to fandom and fanfiction culture, both for good and for bad.

So I had in mind Dorian Bridges and Sarah Z from YouTube and also Sam J. Miller, and EY definitely seems to have a bit of that

So lately, I've been reading Atlas shrugged. Less as a guide for what to believe in, more as an explanation of the mindset that allows people to believe capitalism works ("the alt-right playbook: always a bigger fish" on YouTube is a pretty accurate summary of the communist response to that mindset, although, like, a lot of the things being said there are pretty relevant either way), but this is an interesting read. And I keep thinking.

What's the main difference between AR's philosophy, and that of EY?

Because here's the thing: Harry did make the joke about how atlas shrugged relies too much on an appeal to your sense of exceptionality, but it's not as if the story DISAGREES with the idea of human exceptionality at its core. A while ago, I said that the SPHEW arc was a more convincing argument against democracy than the Stanford prison experiment arc, and what I meant by that was... The Stanford prison experiment makes you think about how interests having the power to game the system makes it vulnerable to something like Azkaban, but it does not fundamentally talk against the idea that we could just educate the public, create a society enlightened enough to vote for a better world. But the SPHEW arc drives home really, really hard the idea of how fundamentally FRUSTRATING it is to try and give power to the people when the people don't know what they're doing. How much it will drive you crazy to try and act on the ideals of egalitarianism, only to be struck in the face time and time again with how most people are, in fact, stupid. HPMOR is a story that, in its core, recognizes how exhausting it is to just KNOW BETTER than everyone around you. "Letting the public decide" gave us Trump, it gave us Brexit, because most people in our society today are not using logic to determine how to make their choices, they will doom the fates of themselves and everyone around them if a charismatic enough guy or a fucking sign on a bus will say it in a way that SOUNDS true. And that sort of thing can really drive you to go and say, fuck it, I should be in control of this thing.

So what makes Rand's philosophy meaningfully different than Yudkovsky's?

Well, for starters, he believes that even if people are stupid, they don't deserve to suffer (Which does conflate a bit with his views on veganism, but you can't always be aware of everything at all times). He believes that if you are smarter than the people around you, you should act to reduce their suffering. That even if they voted for hell upon earth, they still don't deserve to be sent there. Which is basically to say, he does not believe in fate, or in someone's "worthiness" of experiencing a specific one. Nobody "deserves" pain, and everyone "deserve" dignity. Suffering is bad. No matter who, no matter what. It should be inflicted to the extent it can stop more suffering from occurring, and never more than that. If Wizard Hitler was at your mercy, he, too, would not have deserved to suffer. Are you better than everyone around you? Well then you fucking owe it to them to try and save them.

But then there's the next big question: if all fixing the world took was putting smart people in charge, why didn't that happen already?

Here's the thing about billionaires. A lot of them aren't actually stupid. A lot of them are, and just inherited a company from their parents, but a lot of the time, becoming a "self-made billioner" actually requires a lot of smart manipulation of factors. Jeff Bezos' rise to the top did take a hell of a lot of genuine talent. Elon Musk, despite having pretty good opening stats to begin with, did need some pretty amazing skills in order to get to where he got. And for a while, both of those men were known as icons, but then... The world wasn't fixed, and now we know that Amazon keeps squeezing its own workers as hard as possible for profit, and that Elon Musk did... Basically everything he did since. Those men could have saved us! What went wrong?

I think both of them examplify two ways that power, in the hands of someone competent, can go wrong.

Bezos, as a lot of those like him, just eventually came to the conclusion that this wasn't his problem. The world is big, and complicated, and at the end of the day, not your problem. Give away some money to charity, that's gotta be good, but other than that, let the people in charge handle it. Everyone's suffering all the time, and if you don't know how to solve it all, why should you try? Being successful doesn't make you responsible for everyone who isn't. And if you can maximize profits by making sure your workers can't go around talking about unions or a living wage... Well, more money for space exploration's gotta be a good thing, right? The free market game is open for everybody, you're allowed to win this thing.

(Notice how that's literally Randian philosophy. If you have earned it, you're allowed to do whatever you want.)

Elon Musk has a lot on common with what I just described- for example, he also believes that cutting corners over people is justified. Only he believes it for a pretty different reason. He genuinely did believe it IS his job to optimize the world, and so if your technology is your best idea for how to make society better, and you have to believe you're smart enough for it to keep yourself from going insane, then this was a very smart person's best idea for how to better the world, and so a couple workers being sliced by machinery is just gonna be offset by the amount of lives saved in the long run, right? If you're smart enough to be worthy of that power (which can be a very relaxing thing to believe if you have to live with having it), your ideas must be the bottom line, and any attempt to intervene must be an annoying distraction. And then he went even more insane during COVID, and with nobody else around him, he seemed to internalize this belief a few degrees deeper. Safety regulations trying to close your factories during a pandemic? You must be allowed to make them leave, your technology is more important. The free marketplace of ideas doesn't allow people you agree with to say what they want? You must be allowed to buy it and redraw the lines on what people are and aren't allowed to say, your ideas are more important. You literally have power over The Pentagon now? No place to question whether or not you deserve it, after all, governments are made out of stupid people. The sunk cost fallacy has run too deep.

Without checks and balances, people at the top can't be trusted to regulate themselves while holding absolute power.

I do not know if "the right person" for running the world could ever exist. Discworld did try and suggest a model for one, an enlightened, extremely smart man who took control over a country and realized only prioritizing the utmost control for himself and the maximal stability for the world around him is the best chance to prevent it from derailing. And... Could a person like that exist? I mean, statistically, probably. But very few people ever actually have the chance to gain absolute power, and being better than most people in most rooms you were ever in is just not enough to qualify you for that. It's not enough for unchecked power to be held by someone smarter than most of the people around them who believes every idea they feel really confidant about is devine, that's how you get religious texts. And until we can actually get a Vetinari... Democracy looks like the safest bet we got.